One of the exciting new facets of artificial intelligence’s evolution is its integration at the edge. By bringing AI closer to the point of enterprise data generation, companies stand to unlock speed, efficiency, agility and scalability gains.

Live at DTW 2024: Analyzing the Dell AI Factory with Pierluca Chiodelli and Greg Findlen.

Dell Technologies Inc.’s AI Factory combines infrastructure, solutions and services for organizations to rapidly adopt and deploy scalable AI. How does the initiative fit into the enterprise edge?

“You’re taking raw materials, you’re turning them into a finished product that comes out the other side,” said Greg Findlen (pictured, right), senior vice president of product management at Dell. “Only now, we’re using raw data from an enterprise customer’s data set to generate new outcomes that they couldn’t have generated before — huge new set of use cases for our customers. We talk about the infrastructure layer … whether it’s high-speed servers, performance storage or edge devices to deliver that outcome.”

Findlen and Pierluca Chiodelli (left), vice president of engineering technology edge computing offers, strategy and execution at Dell, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the integration of AI at the edge as a significant leap forward in how businesses utilize data and technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell’s AI Factory: Revolutionizing edge AIOps

The concept of the AI Factory is central to Dell’s vision of harnessing AI for enterprise solutions. In transforming raw data into valuable insights, the AI Factory employs high-speed servers, performance storage and a robust infrastructure layer supported by a vast ecosystem of partners.

“We continue to expand to support these use cases with some of the new announcements that we made this week,” Findlen said. “Most critical are services that sit on top of it that to help customers on that journey. We spent a lot of time this week talking about the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, which is a really good example of a specific set of capabilities that we’re bringing together under that umbrella.”

More than merely a collection of servers, the Factory is a comprehensive suite of capabilities, including networking, storage, data protection, AI-ready laptops and workstations. The ultimate goal is to cater to diverse workloads and requirements within large enterprises, from the latest Microsoft Copilot offerings to large-scale systems designed for extensive workloads like training AI models, Findlen added.

“When you look at a large enterprise, there’s a lot of different workloads, and they’re each going to have their different requirements,” he said. “So [the AI Factory] will scale from what we announced with the Microsoft Copilot offerings and the new laptops up to these massive scale-out systems that are being built to support very large workloads.”

The role of AI at the edge is a conversation that’s been evolving for over two decades. While edge-centric AI is not yet synonymous with generative AI, it plays a crucial role in handling pre-trained models that have been refined for years, according to Chiodelli. The challenge now is to move these models to the edge and retrain them effectively.

“The challenge is how, now that you have all this power, you can move this model and retrain the model,” Chiodelli said. “There is a huge opportunity here, especially using NativeEdge. With NativeEdge and what we announced, obviously with the name and Nvidia, is the ability to have a blueprint that can connect, transfer and create a unique CI/CD pipeline that connects edge core and cloud. At that point, not only can I feed the beast, I can also start to do generative AI.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE